ILI Year 5 alum Almeta Whitis is a storyteller, writer, poet and teaching artist, whose life work involves exploring, presenting and honoring cultural connections between people. In 2024, her work was amplified through her own projects and a plethora of awards and accolades from her home community in Rochester, NY.
In the Fall of 2024, Almeta and Joe Beard, a legendary blues guitarist and vocalist, were featured at the event “In This Moment: Revolution, Reckoning, Reparation – Volume 3” at the George Eastman Museum. They took part in a panel discussion and performed songs and stories they love. Almeta’s powerful storytelling and audience leadership was honored in a letter from Jeanne Strazzabosco, where she wrote:
We cannot thank you enough for all you poured into our In This Moment program.
You brought us joy and hope every time we met or talked on the phone.
Your presence is a force of positive energy. Period.
Monday night you brought LIFE into the Dryden Theatre that it has never experienced. Ever. Your welcome was epic. The audience participated and you were magnificent.
Thank you for singing September Rain and Strange Fruit. Your voice touched every soul in the room. Hans Christian Anderson could not have told The Emperor’s New Clothes as artfully as you did. You had us all shouting, “But he hasn’t got anything on!“
Thank you, Almeta. Thank you.
Almeta was recently granted an official proclamation with the seal of the City of Rochester, personally delivered to her by Courtney Thomas, Jr., Rochester’s Mayoral Executive Staff Assistant. The proclamation honors six decades of introducing creative arts and diverse cultural traditions of the city’s diverse peoples, with the intention of coming together as one community.
Almeta’s diverse work and awards now also includes being a finalist in the WOW! Women On Writing Summer 2024 Flash Fiction Contest! As of Oct. 29th, Almeta’s story “100 BC Kaminaljuyu, Meso-America” has made the Top 10, surpassing hundreds of other submissions. The Top 3 stories have not yet been announced. Almeta says, “Should I win – Cool! If not, I’m eager to start entering contests. So far, so good.”
Almeta has been working collaboratively and intergenerationally with Nada Odeh, another ILI Year 5 alum, on the Telling Our Story project. It’s “an archival art installation composed of mosaic and oral histories located in Northeast Rochester, NY working to collect and preserve joyous moments held in spaces and community that have since been ‘disappeared.’”
She is also thrilled to be working creatively with her son Amunubenheh Brown: “I’m excited about two new commissions on the themes of Water Conservation and Free Palestine that my son and I are co-creating content inspired by his video shorts,” like BEAUTIFUL MOTHER” from CONDUITS OF TIME AND LEGACY.
Celebrating Almeta’s Current Program:
Almeta’s successful 2023 “A Season For Silver” Creative Aging Storytelling Initiative for Elders started up again on November 4th of this year at the Burch Community Foundation in Rochester. The program was funded for twice the number of sessions with a new group of in-Rochester elders.
